Kajun’s

Joann Guidos, of New Orleans’s Faubourg Marigny neighborhood, is a big woman with a piercing stare, the bark of a football coach, and a way of hugging people as though she intended to keep them physically anchored to the earth. She held her family of neighborhood drinkers together all through Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, keeping her murky, stifling bar, Kajun’s Pub, open so that the lonely and the broke would not endure the ordeal alone. All last week, a can of Pabst still cost a dollar at Kajun’s, even after the power and water went off and keeping the beer cold meant scrounging for gasoline to feed a noisy generator out back. “These people got no place else to go,” she said, in the meaty New Orleans accent that is more “Sopranos” than “Gone with the Wind.” “I’m not leavin’ ’em.”

At noon a week ago Sunday, eight New Orleans police officers bearing riot guns walked into the bar, ordered the music turned off and the customers out, and told Joann that she had to close. “They said, ‘If you don’t leave, you’ll be shot,’ ” she said. “Never in this country. ”

The regulars at Kajun’s are among those willing to believe the worst about the New Orleans Police Department. “Tuesday night, I’m in the Quarter with fifty bucks to buy gas—I’m not looting,” said Kenny Dobbs, naked to the waist, slick with sweat, and squinting through the smoke of his cigarette. “They pull me over at gunpoint, siphon half my gas, take the fifty bucks and a fifth of Crown. N.O.P.D.” His girlfriend, who wore a Confederate-flag head scarf and Mardi Gras beads, held out a hand to be kissed. “Renée de Ponthieux,” she said. “When Daddy dies, I’ll be the Comtesse de Ponthieux.” She threw back her head and laughed. A brown dog lying on the pool table sat up and howled. Joann, meanwhile, planted herself on a barstool by the front door with a plastic tumbler of Southern Comfort in one hand and a semi-automatic shotgun in the other. On the floor whirred a gigantic unshielded fan that seemed designed to cool an airplane hangar. The best seat in the house was close enough to the fan to keep cool but not so close that one risked falling in and being chopped to bits.

“I never seen her cry—she’s really upset,” said Chris Jungles, Joann’s boyfriend, a tall man who wears a long braid. Jungles grew up in rural Minnesota; in 1987 his three-year-old daughter was killed by a truck and his marriage fell apart. He cooked methamphetamine for a while and indulged in “mucho” pointless violence as a biker, then served two and a half years in San Quentin. “I’ve been clean ever since,” he said, and cast a loving eye at Joann. “She keeps me straight. She’s holding everybody together.” He tossed his braid and downed a yellow Jell-O shot of vodka and tequila. “Sweet Home Alabama” played on the stereo for the third time in half an hour, almost loud enough to drown out the generator and the roar of helicopters.

Up walked Mitch, a bearded man of fifty-eight whose belly showed through a tear in his T-shirt. “You know who did the voice of Yogi Bear?” he asked. “Art Carney.”

Joann started shouting through the door at somebody, or nobody, in the street. “It’s my God-given right according to the U.S. Constitution to bear arms and protect my private property!” she bellowed, while another regular, Larry Stann, an elegantly mannered, if raggedly dressed, black man of sixty-three, whispered in her ear, “Of course, honey, but put the gun right inside the door here.”

“I don’t know where I’d go,” Mitch said. “I never thought about it.” Asked if he has friends or family, he thought a moment, then twirled a finger to take in the room. “Just here.” He shrugged. “If they shoot me, they shoot me.”

“Clint Eastwood’s father?” Mitch said. “Stan Laurel.”

Finally, Chris’s black dog, Louis, bit Renée on the leg, and everybody decided to call it a night. Chris topped up the generator with gas, spilling it on the hot metal. Then he urinated on some paint cans in the alley and locked the door.

The drinking started again the next morning at eight and went on for three more days. The shadow of mandatory evacuation weighed heavily on the regulars at Kajun’s, because most of them didn’t know a thing about the world outside New Orleans. Finally, on Wednesday, the law came back, this time with bunches of plastic wrist ties protruding from their vests. “You go out today on your own, or tomorrow we take you out,” one exhausted officer said. By this time, the fight had gone out of Joann and her extended family. Chris built a plywood box on the top of Joann’s dark-blue van. Kenny loaded his 1979 Cadillac with Renée’s bead collection and enough whiskey to get them to Carriere, Mississippi. The regulars who had been manning the bar since the storm began—ten people in all—were packing. “We stick together,” Joann said, gathering them to her like a den mother. “And we’ll all be back, right? Right?”

Wednesday night, Chris sat at the bar, inconsolable. “I flagged down the Humane Society and gave them Louis,” he said. “I signed the papers to put him to sleep. I love that dog. He was like my child, but I had to do it.” He drained his beer and a sad smile crept across his face. “He was one mean motherfucker,” he said proudly. “Give me a hug.”